Logo Design in 2011, A Case Study

2011 was the year that defined the importance of HTML5 and CSS3 and the best proves are the websites and applications based on these. In spite of this fulminate ascension, many other web design domains exploded or continued the expansion in the previous year. Logo design is one of them, the financial crisis make many business owners to move the affairs in a cheaper place. Undoubtedly, the Internet is one of them. The cost of advertising and the amazing possibilities of creating a solid brand are the decisive facts that determinate this orientation. Under these conditions isn’t a miracle the increased role of a logo.

One of the most important rules of logo design is to create works that are timeless and pass the exam of trends. Such logos are masterpieces and not all the designer can create these. No matter the purpose or the experience of a designer is always welcomed to stay updated to the last trends and the single modality to predict what will be appreciated in the future is to study the past.

This post is created with the main scope to highlight the best logos of the previous year and to see the evolution of some trends and why not, to make some predictions about what will be most appreciated in the current year. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to take into account all the logos uploaded and the value of the statistics presented is based only on some of the most representative logos galleries. To be honest, I based all the next statistics on the logos uploaded on some logo galleries; I really hope that you won’t consider the enumeration of them as an unfair way of advertising. By the way, I select these because of the easiness to extract dates from. These are:

1. The Most Productive Month

First, I was very curious to know which month is more productive for logo designers and which one isn’t the best one for creating logos. The spring is always a good refresher and the number of logos uploaded reveals us that March is the most productive month. The tributes brought to the new season, to the mothers and other women may be enough reasons that decided March being on the first place.

Personally, I consider that the people likes the new beginnings, many of our dreams and wishes are sketched at the beginning of the year, of the season or month. The logo designers also validate this statement in the previous year, January following March in the top.

The coming of winter and the expectations of spending some nice days to ski resorts or simply to enjoy the snow, make the logo designers to dream more and work less, last year, the less productive months were November and December. The graphic bellow show you the number of logos uploaded each month on Logopond, Brands of the world, Logoed and Logo heroes.

Logopond is worldwide appreciated as a top-class showcase of logos and there is a strange fact, by far the most logos are uploaded in August and the small number is in January. An explanation may be the fact that a good logo needs time and after a nice Christmas and New Year party is hard to stay creative and to do really quality jobs. It will be interesting to let me know your opinion about your most productive months, the more opinions the more well based will be the post.

2. Types of Logos

In order to find out the new trends is mandatory to know the “raw materials” of the logos. Some of these use illustrations as icons, drawings or various shapes while others are build only on typographical resources. Other designers are blending these and the results are amazing. A good practice in logo design recommends creating logos that only suggest the character of the owner and the logo shouldn’t necessarily contain the name or a very explicit suggestion of him. In spite of that, the huge majority of logos are created with a clear direction to the owner, mostly of them having the name more or less clearly written.

The statistics are highlighting this pretty obviously, almost 90% of the logos uploaded are created using various shapes and letters while 7% of them are based only on letters. The works that don’t say nothing about the owner and count on the suggestions are very rare, less that 5% being created on this idea.

Black and white

Some consider that is old-fashioned to create black and white logos but the most of us are enjoying these works. The great advantage of these kinds of logos is the possibility of stressing the concept while the graphical representation is put into the shadow. The designers seems to like the black and white format last year because 9% of the logos uploaded were based on this byname or having a very similar structure.

Complex vs. simple

Another interesting fact may be the complexity of the logos, it’s interesting to see how many complex logos were uploaded vs. logos based on less elements into the final design. I defined as simple logos the ones that are build with very few elements, impressing mostly with the concept behind and not by having lots of shapes, types and so one. The representation of these into the yearly number of logos uploaded is important, more than 18% being simple and most important, easy to memorize and remember.

Money and finances

The entire human society passed a very difficult year, the problems of money and the financial crisis being a very hot subject and many blogs, newspapers, televisions debated massively these. It was interesting for me to know if logo design suffered any influence from the economical climate but the results make me very happy, the number of logs related to money and any suggestions to financial institutions is really negligible.

3D

Another trendy solution in 2011 was the 3D influence with was more present than the previous one, more than 13% of the logos having obvious or subtle 3D effect. Personally, I expect 2012 to be the year that brings a large use of these kinds of logos mostly due to the expansion of HTML5 and CSS3, the designers are trying to offer something cool and new to the users.

Joyful and hilarious logos

Joyful and hilarious logos don’t make a trend but it’s interesting to see the proportion of these, isn’t a sure figure but I consider it an “exotic” tool to find out the state of the society. A calm and happy one surely like these logos while a more ingandurata and under pressure won’t appreciate these (once again, it’s a personal opinion and it has no scientifically or sociological base). Anyway, the results make me happy: the logos containing a smiling entity or everything that is hilarious are more than 8% from the ones uploaded in 2011. It seems that we enjoy the life!

Colorful vs. monocolor

Definitely, the colors are playing a huge role in the overall judgment of a logo and the designers are paying great attention to this aspect. The rules of designing consider that is enough to use two colors into a project, three being the upper limit. As I previously mentioned, these are rules that sometimes deserve to be broken but these “illegalities” must be done by specialists, isn’t a thing for the beginners.

27% of the logos are highly colored using nice gradients or simply are designed using penury of colors that impress the viewers. On the other hand, logos colored in a single nuance are also present in a good proportion of 23%.

Gradient vs. dull colors

Building a logo that is colored using a gradient solution may suffer at the versatility chapter because in print is very unlikely that it will look the same. By using dull colors is obviously, a huge advantage, the logo may be used on various mediums – on a business card, on a huge banner outdoor but also on a small banner on a website and of course, as the logo of the official website. 15% of the logos of the previous year use powerful gradients and some of them are really masterpieces.
The rest of the logos respect the rule of the design anterior mentioned.

The colors used

From my researches is obvious that white is very important in the work of the logo designer. It’s true that in the most cases the background of the logos is white but it wasn’t taken into account when I work to establish the most used colors into logo design in 2011. Also the figures below aren’t based on the preponderant color, I counted each color no matter how much was used, i.e., it was enough to see a red point that it was instantly remarked and counted.

The white seems to be the winner of the colors, more than a quarter of logos having white into the composition. The second position is reserved for the blue; it is the most favorite color of the worldwide people hence is normal to be on the podium. The next are yellow and black having almost similar percentages.

Red, gray and green are used in logo design, the percentages varying very interesting, in arithmetic progression, 16%, 14% and 12%. It’s more practically to see diagram bellow.

Best Logo Designs in 2011

The next logos are ones of the best in 2011, I can’ t say that these are the best of the best and the order is totally randomly. I beg pardon for the logo designers that created more awesome works that aren’t inserted here, let me know it and I will write another post and the logo will be inserted into it.

Fork & Knife

Night Golf

Fine Cell Work

Panda

Radio

Safety

Sneaky elephant

Bowling shoe

Shift

Flightning

Tucando

Come home cafe

Factory Business

Storm Foundry

Jam Session

Talkmore

Airth

Sit&Drink

Art Eagle

Namazu

Eagle song studio

Weway Media

Billy Turf

Truce

Cyber Cafe

Winy collection

Diceberry

Beaumonde

Rio 2016 Olympics Logo

Tailored

Platea

AskFox

Blue Sheep Books

Homeart

Doll

Firepointe

M.King

Cavea

Camara De Comercio de Bogota

TourExpert

Unlock

HE

CrownJet

Xavier Fence

Fastclick

Syntech

Moon cafe

Cheap Flight Travel Agency

Soon on Mars

Polar Furnace

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Meet the Author:

Daniel Pintilie

Daniel Pintilie is working for Go-gulf.com, a Dubai based web design company that provides web design solution in Kuwait, Bahrain, Sharjah and Middle East. I really love logos that say "simple is better", but in the same time I want to emphasize in my posts that only hard work is the key of success.

These are some really good Logos. Excellent for inspiration. However, this post is misleading. The title: “Logo Design in 2011, A Case Study” made me think it was going to be a critique or showcase of Logo Design in 2011, from real companies/organizations. The logos shown here seem to be from random Designers’ portfolios. Don’t get me wrong, good designers are setting trends for the rest of the world to follow but what about the advertising world, and companies like: DC comics, JCpenney, Starbucks, Apple, etc…they changed their logos… What trends are these companies following or creating? Is it from these designers?